Introduction

Ncat is a feature-packed networking utility which reads and
writes data across networks from the command line. Ncat was written
for the Nmap Project as a much-improved reimplementation of the
venerable Netcat. It uses
both TCP and UDP for communication and is designed to be a reliable
back-end tool to instantly provide network connectivity to other
applications and users. Ncat will not only work with IPv4 and IPv6 but
provides the user with a virtually limitless number of potential uses.

Among Ncat’s vast number of features there is the ability to chain
Ncats together, redirect both TCP and UDP ports to other sites, SSL
support, and proxy connections via SOCKS4 or HTTP (CONNECT method)
proxies (with optional proxy authentication as well). Some general
principles apply to most applications and thus give you the capability
of instantly adding networking support to software that would normally
never support it.

Ncat is integrated with Nmap and is available in the standard Nmap
download packages (including source code and Linux, Windows, and Mac
binaries) available from
the Nmap download page.
You can also find it in
our SVN
source code repository.

Many users have asked for a statically compiled version of ncat.exe that they can just drop on a Windows system and use without having to run any installer or copy over extra library files. We have built a statically compiled Windows binary version of Ncat 5.59BETA1. You can download it inside a zip file here. To ensure the file hasn't been tampered with, you can check the cryptographic signatures. If you need a portable version of a newer Ncat release, see the Ncat portable compilation instructions.

The Ncat Users' Guide contains full
documentation including many tips, tricks, and practical real-life examples! There is also an Ncat man page for a quick usage summary.